The Rev. Septimus Barmby was mouthpiece for congregations. Sound of a subterranean roar, with a blast at the orifice, informed her of their ‘very deep happiness in the privilege.’
He comforted her. Nesta smiled on him thankfully.
‘Don’t imagine, Mrs. Victor, that you can be shut off from neighbours, in a house like this; and they have a claim,’ said Lady Grace, quitting the table.
Fenellan and Colney thought so:
‘Like mice at a cupboard.’
‘Beetles in a kitchen.’
‘No, no-no, no!’ Victor shook head, pitiful over the good people likened to things unclean, and royally upraising them: in doing which, he scattered to vapour the leaden incubi they had been upon his flatter moods of late. ‘No, but it’s a rapture to breathe the air here!’ His lifted chest and nostrils were for the encouragement of Nataly to soar beside him.
She summoned her smile and nodded.
He spoke aside to Lady Grace: ‘The dear soul wants time to compose herself after a grand surprise.’
She replied: ‘I think I could soon be reconciled. How much land?’
‘In treaty for some hundred and eighty or ninety acres… in all at present three hundred and seventy, including plantations, lake, outhouses.’
‘Large enough; land paying as it does—that is, not paying. We shall be having to gamble in the City systematically for subsistence.’
‘You will not so much as jest on the subject.’
Coming from such a man, that was clear sky thunder. The lady played it off in a shadowy pout and shrug while taking a stamp of his masterfulness, not so volatile.
She said to Nataly: ‘Our place in Worcestershire is about half the size, if as much. Large enough when we’re not crowded out with gout and can open to no one. Some day you will visit us, I hope.’
‘You we count on here, Lady Grace.’
It was an over-accentuated response; unusual with this well-bred woman; and a bit of speech that does not flow, causes us to speculate. The lady resumed: ‘I value the favour. We’re in a horsey-doggy-foxy circle down there. We want enlivening. If we had your set of musicians and talkers!’
Nataly smiled in vacuous kindness, at a loss for the retort of a compliment to a person she measured. Lady Grace also was an amiable hostile reviewer. Each could see, to have cited in the other, defects common to the lower species of the race, admitting a superior personal quality or two; which might be pleaded in extenuation; and if the apology proved too effective, could be dispersed by insistence upon it, under an implied appeal to benevolence. When we have not a liking for the creature whom we have no plain cause to dislike, we are minutely just.
During the admiratory stroll along the ground-floor rooms, Colney Durance found himself beside Dr. Schlesien; the latter smoking, striding, emphasizing, but bearable, as the one of the party who was not perpetually at the gape in laudation. Colney was heard to say: ‘No doubt: the German is the race the least mixed in Europe: it might challenge aboriginals for that. Oddly, it has invented the Cyclopaedia for knowledge, the sausage for nutrition! How would you explain it?’
Dr. Schlesien replied with an Atlas shrug under fleabite to the insensately infantile interrogation.
He in turn was presently heard.
‘But, my good sir! you quote me your English Latin. I must beg of you you write it down. It is orally incomprehensible to Continentals.’
‘We are Islanders!’ Colney shrugged in languishment.
‘Oh, you do great things…’ Dr. Schlesien rejoined in kindness, making his voice a musical intimation of the smallness of the things.
‘We build great houses, to employ our bricks’
‘No, Colney, to live in,’ said Victor.
‘Scarcely long enough to warm them.’
‘What do you… fiddle!’
‘They are not Hohenzollerns!’
‘It is true,’ Dr. Schlesien called. ‘No, but you learn discipline; you build. I say wid you, not Hohenzollerns you build! But you shall look above: Eyes up. Ire necesse est. Good, but mount; you come to something. Have ideas.’
‘Good, but when do we reach your level?’
‘Sir, I do not say more than that we do not want instruction from foreigners.’
‘Pupil to paedagogue indeed. You have the wreath in Music, in Jurisprudence, Chemistry, Scholarship, Beer, Arms, Manners.’
Dr. Schlesien puffed a tempest of tobacco and strode.
‘He is chiselling for wit in the Teutonic block,’ Colney said, falling back to Fenellan.
Fenellan observed: ‘You might have credited him with the finished sculpture.’
‘They’re ahead of us in sticking at the charge of wit.’
‘They’ve a widening of their swallow since Versailles.’
‘Manners?’
‘Well, that’s a tight cravat for the Teutonic thrapple! But he’s off by himself to loosen it.’
Victor came on the couple testily. ‘What are you two concocting! I say, do keep the peace, please. An excellent good fellow; better up in politics than any man I know; understands music; means well, you can see. You two hate a man at all serious. And he doesn’t bore with his knowledge. A scholar too.’
‘If he’ll bring us the atmosphere of the groves of Academe, he may swing his ferule pickled in himself, and welcome,’ said Fenellan.
‘Yes!’ Victor nodded at a recognized antagonism in Fenellan; ‘but Colney’s always lifting the Germans high above us.’
‘It’s to exercise his muscles.’
Victor headed to the other apartments, thinking that the Rev. Septimus and young Sowerby, Old England herself, were spared by the diversion of these light skirmishing shots from their accustomed victims to the ‘masculine people of our time. His friends would want a drilling to be of aid to him in his campaign to come. For it was one, and a great one. He remembered his complete perception of the plan, all the elements of it, the forward whirling of it, just before the fall on London Bridge. The greatness of his enterprise laid such hold of him that the smallest of obstacles had a villanous aspect; and when, as anticipated, Colney and Fenellan were sultry flies for whomsoever they could fret, he was blind to the reading of absurdities which caused Fredi’s eyes to stream and Lady Grace beside him to stand awhile and laugh out her fit. Young Sowerby appeared forgiving enough—he was a perfect gentleman: but Fredi’s appalling sense of fun must try him hard. And those young fellows are often more wounded by a girl’s thoughtless laughter than by a man’s contempt. Nataly should have protected him. Her face had the air of a smiling general satisfaction; sign of a pleasure below the mark required; sign too of a sleepy partner for a battle. Even in the wonderful kitchen, arched and pillared (where the explanation came to Nesta of Madame Callet’s frequent leave of absence of late, when an inferior dinner troubled her father in no degree), even there his Nataly listened to the transports of the guests with benign indulgence.
‘Mama!’ said Nesta, ready to be entranced by kitchens in her bubbling animation: she meant the recalling of instances of the conspirator her father had been.
‘You none of you guessed Armandine’s business!’ Victor cried, in a glee that pushed to make the utmost of this matter and count against chagrin. ‘She was off to Paris; went to test the last inventions:—French brains are always alert:—and in fact, those kitchen-ranges, gas and coal, and the apparatus for warming plates and dishes, the whole of the battery is on the model of the Duc d’Ariane’s—finest in Europe. Well,’ he agreed with Colney, ‘to say France is enough.’
Mr. Pempton spoke